Avey and welcome to Emperor's of Rome, a Roman history podcast from Latrobe University.

I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is

Associate Professor Rianna Evans, headed the Department of Language and

Linguistics at Latrobe University. This is episode C-L V, Messelina.

Messalina, 3rd wife of Claudius, is likely one of the Roman empresses with the worst reputation.

The historian's accuser of adultery and prostitution, avarice and greed, and her name becomes synonymous with a woman of loose morals and licentiousness.

But unrelated to these qualities, here's Rianna Evans.

Valeria Messalina was the third wife of the Emperor Claudius. Now he will have four so she's not going to be the last one.

As you can already tell this might be a sad story. She's sort of a mysterious figure to us early on but once she comes into the life of

Claudius we get quite a bit of information about her from say the biography of

Claudius by Suetonius and actually much more so from Tacitus and Diocassius' histories.

Ultimately, as many of these Roman empresses are, she's a tangential character to the story of an emperor.

Yeah, as we've seen even with such prominent female figures as Cleopatra,

she doesn't get her own biography.

She turns up in other peoples.

Okay, so what do we know about Messalina before she met slash married, which probably happened at the same time?

Claudius.

So she marries him in around 38, maybe a year later, 39 CE.

All we really know is that she comes from an extremely elite,

as you'd expect, family and is indeed related to the Imperial Dynasty itself related to Claudius, a little more

distantly than his fourth wife will be.

Her father was the consul of 16 BC E, Lucius de de Michio Henebabas and if those names seem familiar

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